LVA grad returns to Vegas as congregation’s cantor

Like many of her classmates at Las Vegas Academy, Jessica Hutchings has loved listening to music since she was a kid, when she’d sing along to and mimic her favorite pop stars of the era.

Like some of her classmates at Las Vegas Academy, Hutchings studied music in college and has succeeded in forging a professional career in music.

But unlike most, if not all, of her classmates at Las Vegas Academy, Hutchings’ successful career in music is set not on the secular stage but in synagogues, where she shares her love of music and talent by serving as an ordained cantor.

On Feb. 13, Hutchings will be installed as cantor at Congregation Ner Tamid in Henderson, marking a return to the valley in which she grew up and the congregation in which both her Jewish identity and her love of Jewish music was fostered.

Hutchings certainly doesn’t fit any stereotypical notions of a cantor. She’s young (29), hip (early musical influences include Gwen Stefani and No Doubt), and versatile enough to handle anything from a traditional liturgy to her own original Beatles Shabbat service.

And that she’ll be serving at the congregation in which she spent her own childhood? Call it bashert, a Hebrew expression that, Hutchings explains, means “meant to be.”

Hutchings was born in Orange County, Calif., but moved to Las Vegas when she was 8. She attended Lummis Elementary School and Becker Middle School while growing up. After attending a synagogue or two, she and her family became members of Congregation Ner Tamid, a Reform congregation that, in those days, was on Emerson Avenue in Las Vegas.

And, even then, Hutchings loved music. “I wanted to be Britney Spears. I wanted to be a pop star,” Hutchings says, smiling.

“Actually, we’re putting together something for my installation, a collage of photos. I think we have one of me wearing sweats and sunglasses and carrying around my first Sony (tape player). I was 3 years old and I had my microphone in my hand. I was already a diva.”

As a kid, while she was riding in the car with her father, the soundtrack would include such artists as Elton John and the Eagles and the Bangles and the Beatles, Hutchings recalls.

“That was when I would tell him, ‘I’m going to be as good as them when I grow up.’ ”

But beyond classics of a contemporary genre, Hutchings says she also “loved Jewish music from the very beginning. That was my connection to music, initially.”

By 5 or 6, the music she’d play in the car would include songs by Debbie Friedman, a songwriter and performer whom, she says, was known as “the Joan Baez of Jewish music.”

In fact, in what now seems to be a portent of things to come, Friedman once visited Hutchings’ school as a guest artist at Hutchings’ kindergarten consecration, a ceremony to “start (kids’) religious education.”

Hutchings happened to stand next to Friedman while the class sang. Afterward, Hutchings says, “she leaned down to me and said, ‘Little girl, you have a very nice voice.’ “

Hutchings laughs. “I told her that story years later when I auditioned to cantorial school, and she had no recollection of it.”

Nonetheless, Hutchings says that, in some way, she even then connected to Friedman’s take on Jewish music, and listening to it changed things for her.

Hutchings sang in choirs all through school, and when her mother and others suggested in middle school that she might want to audition for Las Vegas Academy, it seemed reasonable. By then, Hutchings already had thought about someday singing professionally.

“I always loved singing, but make an actual career out of it? I think that was probably around 12,” she says. “But what 12-year-old doesn’t have a dream like that?”

She auditioned and was accepted into the academy. Her performance resume there includes roles in “Les Miserables” and “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” both of which helped to ignite a love of opera.

“It was kind of a connection right away,” Hutchings says. “I kind of fell in love with it.”

But Hutchings’ love of Jewish music never abated. “My Jewish identity was always important to me,” says Hutchings, who never tired of going to temple, celebrating Jewish holidays and listening to and singing Jewish songs.

After beginning music studies at California State University, Long Beach, Hutchings became involved with a congregation in Fountain Valley, Calif. The summer between her junior and senior years in college, Hutchings was asked to fill in as music leader while the congregation’s cantor was on maternity leave.

“I was just, like, an opera student at Long Beach. I grew up in synagogues. I knew the service, but I didn’t really know it. And the rabbi there, who’s retired now, he’s like a mensch of a guy … over those three months, over the summer, he and I had a lot of fun on the bimah.”

When Hutchings returned to school in September to resume classes, “I told my opera coach, ‘I think this summer changed everything for me. I think I want to go down the track of being a cantor instead of an opera singer.’

“He was, like, ‘I was waiting for you to tell me that.’ I was preparing a piece for my recital in Hebrew, and he was, ‘It’s beautiful when you sang in German, in Italian, in French, but when you sang in Hebrew, there was something I can’t teach you that you had and that made it different.’ “

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in music/opera performance, Hutchings began to look into cantorial programs. She enrolled at the Academy for Jewish Religion California, completing a five-year course of cantorial study and was graduated in May 2014 with a master’s degree in sacred Jewish music and ordination as cantor. (Along the way, Hutchings also earned a master’s in education and a second bachelor’s degree in Hebrew letters and literature.)

Cantors are ordained members of the clergy who guide congregants in prayer, liturgy and song and also serve as music leaders for a congregation. During her studies, “I leaned the intricacies of Jewish music you don’t get just being in a congregation,” Hutchings says.

“Jewish music has been important for thousands of years. You can date it back to the Levites and King David with his harp and beautiful voice. It’s always been very important, and the color of the melody shapes each holiday, so there’s a … melody for any specific holiday. So on Shabbat, the (melody) sounds different than it does on high holidays.”

Then, from a technical perspective, “there are all of these intricacies and there are melodic lines and scales we use that are very different from Western music,” Hutchings says. “So you have to learn all of that.”

The biggest difference between singing opera and serving as a cantor? As cantor, “I’m not performing. I’m channeling something spiritual,” Hutchings says. “I’m trying to move the congregation to feel prayer or to pray themselves.”

Rabbi Sanford Akselrad has been spiritual leader of Congregation Ner Tamid since 1988 and has known Hutchings since she was a child attending services there. He notes that it can be “very tempting” for vocalists and congregants alike to attend worship thinking that “they’re coming to a show.”

Hutchings “approaches her music as her prayer,” he continues. “There is a performance aspect (in that) it’s got to be beautiful and you want to engage people, but that’s not the primary thing. What is primary is that you touch people, you inspire people and you help them wherever they are to find God through the beauty of the Jewish music and melodies.”

Hutchings brings to her calling as Congregation Ner Tamid’s first full-time ordained cantor “a depth and wisdom beyond her years and a maturity beyond her years that serves her well,” Akselrad adds.

Hutchings describes her voice as lyric soprano. But, more relevant to serving as a cantor, it’s “versatile” in that it can serve the variety of styles in which a cantor might sing or pray.

“When you’re praying on the bimah, you have to connect with your congregation, and they’re not all sopranos and not all tenors,” she says, “(so) I have a versatile voice so I can sing with my congregation and I can sing to move my congregation.”

Connecting with a congregation also calls for some out-of-the-box thinking. Hutchings last year presented a Beatles-themed Shabbat service, and, for her master’s thesis, she performed a duet with Jewish music singer/rapper Matisyahu, an experience that was, Hutchings says, “awesome.”

In a more secular realm, Hutchings has performed the national anthem at hockey and basketball games, and even “O Canada” at the former.

She laughs. “I actually was so nervous about ‘O Canada,’ I think I messed up the American (anthem), but not many people noticed.”

Even as she pursues her calling as a cantor, Hutchings hopes to also continue to observe, and make use of, contemporary secular music. Keeping up with the latter is vital, given that Hutchings’ duties include working with teenagers and young people, including those who are preparing for bat and bar mitzvahs.

“I have to be current with what’s on the radio because I have to connect with my seventh-grade class and my teenagers,” she says. ” I feel that’s part of my calling, to ready the next generation.”

Hutchings and her husband, Jeremy, have been married six years and recently purchased a home in Henderson. Returning to Congregation Ner Tamid is working out well, even if some of the congregation’s members she knew then may have to revise their images of the kid they once knew.

It’s funny, Hutchings says, that “I love Las Vegas, but I also wanted to get out of Vegas when I was in high school. So I always said, ‘I’m never coming back to live in Las Vegas unless the job at Ner Tamid opens up.”

It is, she says, bashert.

Coming back “definitely feels like a homecoming,” Hutchings adds. “It’s nice. It’s kind of like there’s a sense of pride that their little bat mitzvah girl turned into a cantor and is now serving their community.”

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.